In a typical sheet-fed printing machine, blank sheets are provided in a store and are fed singly from the store to a printing station where an image is transferred onto the paper in a conventional manner. The imaged sheet is then fed to an output station. An example of a typical reprographic printing machine is described in U.S. Pat, No. 5,146,286 which describes a particularly compact architecture in which the functions of copy sheet feeding and stacking are combined into one apparatus. Another example of a reprographic printing machine is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,141,545.
There is a continuing need to enable images to be reproduced on sheets of different type. In simple reprographic machines this requires that prior to the printing operation, a sheet of the particular type required is loaded into the sheet store for feeding to the copying station. More sophisticated reprographic machines include a number of sheet stores enabling sheets to be drawn from a selected one of those stores depending upon the type of sheet required. In a simple example, the different type of sheet may comprise sheets of different sizes, for example A4 and A3. At present, relatively complex sheet feeding apparatuses are needed to convey sheets from the different stores to the copying/printing station.